Life in the Garden Read online

  All these are different approaches to the atmospheric garden and, apart from Vuillard’s rather disturbing take, celebrate the inspirational possibilities of the garden, as offering a refuge, a personal sanctuary. But, at the other end of the spectrum, the atmospheric garden becomes something else entirely. We may as well start with the most unnerving.

  Edvard Munch’s Jealousy in the Garden, 1929, is apparently one of eleven painted versions of Jealousy (including one called Jealousy in the Bath). In the foreground is a huge white triangular face with staring brown eyes and down-turned mouth – definitely first cousin to the figure in The Scream. At the back, to one side of an angry, dark-trunked central tree (the only identifiable garden element), two people stand together, presumably the objects of jealousy, and to the right is another, solitary figure, perhaps observing, perhaps counselling. What is going on here? The painting clearly has a story to tell, and the garden, as such, is incidental but is nevertheless the setting. In Apple Tree in the Garden, Munch has no figures and no story, but his apple tree is again disconcerting, an indigo-blue trunk and a green canopy studded with yellow-green blob apples, a very 1920s-looking house in the background.

  Paul Klee, with his Death in the Garden, is quite as alarming as Munch. A composition of geometrical shapes, flushed with ochre, green and pink, the only suggestion of a garden being a scatter of stylized trees, each just a few brushstrokes, and left of centre an awkwardly sprawled naked woman, possibly pregnant, head lurched to one side against a suggestive pool of red. Oh dear. And when Klee offers White Blossom in the Garden, the uneasy flower is made up of four spiky protrusions above a mesh of curving bands of colour – yellow, blue and contrasting greens. His picture of a Garden in Dark Colours is more satisfying as a painting – wavy colour shapes against a deep brown-black background, but you search hard for the garden implications. And, intriguingly, it seems that in fact Klee was fascinated by plants and their structure and many hundreds of his works are based on plant imagery; moreover, he was himself an energetic and skilled gardener.

  Van Gogh said that he discovered the laws of simultaneous colour contrast while studying flowers. This is the effect of interaction between colours, so that two colours seen together modify each other – red appearing more orange when in proximity to blue, and blue appearing green when in proximity to red. His painting of Daubigny’s Garden in Auvers, 1890, is all swirl and shape – curved beds with swirling green-brown plants, highlighted in white or pink, and some possible red geraniums, daubs and dashes of white and ochre against green for the grass, an effect of energy, and, yes, intriguing colour contrasts, a response to the complexity of nature. But, during the year he spent in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, he painted Le parc de l’hôpital, à Saint-Rémy, and himself described it in a letter as an expression of his melancholy: ‘You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety.’ Restless swirls of leaves for the trees, one of which has had a branch lopped off, and appears starkly amputated, the sky overcast with just glimpses of blue at the horizon, a small figure in blue quite dwarfed by the trees, two benches on which nobody sits – no, this is not a comfortable park.

  So that is what a selection of artists did with a selection of gardens. And what becomes clear is that in their hands a garden – a flower – is never just a garden or a flower, but a resource for the exploration of colour possibilities, of the evanescence of light and movement, the study of form and structure. Or, for the expression of mood and emotion, the capture of a significant moment, the summoning-up of time and experience. They make extravagant use of gardens, do artists, they individualize them – a Monet garden is a world away from a Van Gogh garden – the garden may shape their work, but their gardens also shape our perception of the garden, of plants and flowers, so that, once seen, a particular painting will forever influence our own vision: reality is affected by metaphor.

  There does seem to be some kind of parallel between the ways in which writers and painters use gardens and garden imagery. The reality garden invites use as metaphor, for a novelist – to suggest mood, climate, personality – while for the painter intense study can influence and determine presentation, the discovery of a personal vision – the garden expressing the painter’s own perception. A metamorphosis, perhaps, rather than a metaphor, but in each case the real garden has undergone a sea-change, either as language or as paint on a canvas. And I found it particularly interesting to discover how many painters were applied gardeners. Chocolate earth under the fingernails for Virginia Woolf, but also for Monet, Bonnard, Matisse, Klee.

  The Written Garden

  ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ The opening line of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and she goes on to evoke the dreamed garden: ‘The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs … Ivy held prior place in this lost garden, the long strands crept across the lawns, and soon would encroach upon the house itself … Nettles were everywhere, the vanguard of the army. They choked the terrace, they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the very windows of the house.’ There are several pages of this, and you know where you are at once: the garden as image of decay and destruction, of time passing. And with suggested menace. We read with a shiver of anticipation, though the garden-minded reader will itch to get going with secateurs and strimmer.

  This is a garden – albeit a dreamed garden – used with intent, conjured up with fictional purpose to serve as atmospheric ingredient in the story. Manderley and its surroundings on the Cornish coast are almost an extra character in Du Maurier’s powerful novel. The narrator (we never learn her name – an odd authorial gimmick) is the young bride of the glamorous Maxim de Winter, and arrives there to find a climate of mystery and oppression – the sinister housekeeper, the pervading memory of the dead first wife, Rebecca, and the narrator’s obsessive belief that Maxim is in permanent mourning for her and that she can never take Rebecca’s place. When first she arrives at Manderley with Maxim, rhododendrons are brought into service: ‘We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery … They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon another in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before.’ Rebecca had been a vibrant dark beauty, and when the narrator first uses the morning room, Rebecca’s personal space, she finds it filled with rhododendrons, rich and glowing, used as cut flowers in this room and no other; they are uncomfortable, assertive, suggestive.

  Manderley is a Jacobean mansion, modelled in part on Menabilly, the Cornish house in which Du Maurier lived for many years. Perhaps there were rhododendrons there, an inspirational prompt, and a correct one – they do well in the West Country climate and soil, and require the extensive grounds of some substantial mansion. Nothing hesitant or unassuming about the rhododendron, and they seem an appropriate image for the haunting presence of the dead Rebecca – flamboyant, luxuriant, confident.

  The fictional garden of intent needs to be skilfully and knowledgeably planted. Daphne du Maurier knew what she was about with those rhododendrons, and the dreamed garden is entirely persuasive. Those nettles; the ivy. Ivy is definitely the novelist’s plant of choice; as soon as ivy sneaks in you know it is there with possibly sinister intent. Elizabeth Bowen has a story called ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, in which a middle-aged man returns to the south coast town in which, as a small boy, he frequently stayed with a friend of his mother, a widow who lived in the abandoned house at which he gazes as the story opens: ‘Ivy gripped and sucked at the flight of steps, down which with such a deceptive wildness it seemed to be flowing like a cascade. Ivy matted the door at the top and amassed in bushes above and below the porch. More, it had covered, one might
feel consumed, one entire half of the high, double-fronted house … To crown all, the ivy was now in fruit, clustered over with fleshy pale green berries. There was something brutal about its fecundity.’

  The story is about the boy’s experience in that house, back in the early years of the twentieth century, observing and not comprehending adult behaviour, absorbing the culture of the genteel, leisured town, in which people are occupied with the expenditure of wealth, and in which, ‘Best of all, there were no poor to be seen.’ The subject matter is deception, the harm done to a child’s emotional life, and the shadow of approaching war. In a subsequent war – the Second World War – the town had been on the front line, the house requisitioned, that way of life gone for ever. And the ivy nicely sums it all up, with an exaggerated use of words: ‘consumed’, ‘brutal’. Time, and events, have destroyed a society, a child’s expectations and assumptions.

  What kind of ivy, one wonders? Not elegant, well-behaved ‘Goldheart’, I think. Definitely one of those large-leafed leathery thugs that should not be on offer in garden centres without a health-and-safety warning. I know all about those; I have one, planted in all innocence, and now it swarms an extra three or four feet up a wall each year, and requires attack by a hired garden firm. Though I allow it to stay because robins nest in it, and ivy is the food plant of the holly blue caterpillar, and I love to see those first sky-blue butterflies in early summer. And this is reality ivy, rather than fictional, so I do not have to consider its implications. Though the proliferation of urban ivy does make me think, looking around neighbouring gardens, that if the human race vanished from London it is the ivy that would rapidly take over, swarming, consuming … And the foxes.

  I suspect that Elizabeth Bowen was a gardener, though I can’t find any biographical confirmation. But she frequently gives fictional space to gardens, or flowers, and with intent. In another story, it is the rose that sets the tone. ‘Each side of the path, hundreds of standard roses bloomed, over-charged with colour, as though this were their one hour. Crimson, coral, blue-pink, lemon and cold white, they disturbed with fragrance the dead air. In this spellbound afternoon, with no shadows, the roses glared at the strangers, frighteningly bright.’

  All is not well here, we at once suspect, and indeed it is not. ‘Look at All Those Roses’ has a couple suffer a car breakdown; the wife is given tea at the house of the roses while her husband goes in search of help. Her hostess is an odd, bleak woman; there is a paraplegic child, a girl who makes precocious comments. Nothing is explained, there are just disturbing hints. And the glaring roses.

  Standard roses, you note, placing them very much within a context. The standard rose is pretty well a dead duck nowadays, though Elizabeth Bowen wasn’t concerned with the rose as a style symbol (more on that in a later section). Her roses are scene-setters, pure and simple, and elsewhere she can flourish a garden to define the personality of its owner. In her novel The Little Girls, she plunges the reader into a garden with ‘steamy flower-smells … spongy serpentine grass path … Mauve, puce and cream-pink stocks … blue-bronze straggling profusion of catmint. Magnificent gladioli staggered this way and that … she was an exuberant, loving, confused and not tidy gardener … Roses were … squandering petals over cushions of pansies … dahlias grew: some dwarf, some giant, some corollas like blazons, some close-fluted, some velvet, some porcelain or satin.’ We get a clear picture of the person who would have such a garden, and there is a period touch here also (the book is set in the 1920s) – the staggering gladioli and the range of dahlias. The discriminating dahlia grower of today sticks to those small-headed free-flowering kinds, preferably that scarlet one called ‘Bishop of Llandaff’. But the range quoted tells me also that Elizabeth Bowen knew a thing or two about dahlias.

  It is nicely appropriate that two of our best-known children’s books feature gardens – The Secret Garden and Tom’s Midnight Garden, though to very different ends. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was first published in book form in 1911 (as a serial in 1910). She was by then an established author, already a bestseller with her Little Lord Fauntleroy. The garden of The Secret Garden is an abandoned walled garden into which the child Mary, the story’s protagonist, finds her way: ‘It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together … All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves.’

  Mary Lennox is a ten-year-old orphan who has been sent from India, where she was born, into the care of her guardian uncle at Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire. He is absent, and Mary finds herself alone there with the housekeeper and servants. She is a child who has been neglected by her parents but indulged by Indian servants, and is as a result spoiled and self-centred. The theme of the book is regeneration – the regeneration of Mary by those at the Manor and beyond who are constructively kind to her, the recovery of Colin, a hysterical invalid who, she discovers, is the other child resident at the Manor, the ten-year-old son of the absent Mr Craven. And, symbolically, the recovery of the garden, which is the site of the death of Mr Craven’s wife, and the reason for its abandonment. He returns, and sees the restored garden: ‘The place was a wilderness of autumn gold and purple and violet blue and flaming scarlet and on every side were sheaves of late lilies standing together – lilies which were white or white and ruby. He remembered well when the first of them had been planted that just at this season of the year their late glories should reveal themselves. Late roses climbed and hung and clustered and the sunshine deepening the hue of the yellowing trees made one feel that one stood in an embowered temple of gold.’

  So this is a story heavy with significance – that children will behave according to the way in which they have been treated, that trauma can be overcome by the right kind of application, that fresh air and outdoor activity are good for you. Perhaps that is why I don’t at all care for it; the book seems from the start too heavily and obviously loaded with meaning, and sentimental with patches of whimsy. But many will disagree; the book has been widely admired, and is seen as a seminal children’s classic. It is very much of its time – the emphasis on healing through the power of positive thinking came from the Christian Science movement, in which Frances Hodgson Burnett was interested. And the crucial importance of fresh air was a central tenet of early-twentieth-century childcare. It hung on, indeed, until mid-century. I can remember parking the baby in her pram out in the garden in midwinter, because that was what the baby books said you should do. All that is fair enough; what puts me off is the way in which the beliefs are expressed, with the idea of a kind of ‘magic’ for which the main vehicle is an extremely tiresome robin, who invites several pages of whimsical writing.

  The concept of the garden, on the other hand, is fine, and convincingly realized. Ann Thwaite, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s biographer, has pointed out that she was an active and practical gardener, and she herself wrote: ‘I love to kneel down on the grass at the edge of a flower bed and pull out the weeds fiercely and throw them into a heap by my side. I love to fight with those who can spring up again almost in a night and taunt me. I tear them up by the roots again and again …’ And the secret garden descriptions are nicely precise, as an account of what happens to an abandoned garden, and also of its rejuvenation: the pruning of the roses convincingly accurate.

  The garden of The Secret Garden is a therapeutic garden. Half a century separates
its publication from that of Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, which could not be more different, and the central distinction lies in the voice, the tone of the book. The Secret Garden has that characteristic Edwardian note of patronage, the arch tone of the period (escaped by some, notably Edith Nesbit), writing down to children. Philippa Pearce comes from another age of children’s literature and the writing of Tom’s Midnight Garden is unaffected, a pure and direct narrative voice. And the garden is a dreamed garden, a garden that no longer exists, in the time of the story, but is the wonderful catalyst for a fantasy about the nature of time. Tom Long has been sent to stay during the summer holidays with an uncle and aunt, because his brother has measles. The uncle and aunt live in a flat which is part of the conversion of a large, old house, in the hall of which is a grandfather clock that Tom hears strike thirteen, as he lies awake at midnight. He steals downstairs to inspect it, and finds that a door opens into a garden, where by day there had been nothing but a yard with dustbins: ‘… a great lawn where flowerbeds bloomed; a towering fir-tree, and thick, beetle-browed yews that humped their shapes down two sides of the lawn; on the third side, to the right, a greenhouse almost the size of a real house; from each corner of the lawn, a path that twisted away to some other depths of garden, with other trees.’

  And so it all begins. A little girl appears in the garden – Hatty – and Tom is no longer alone but is joined every night by this pinafored playmate. Hatty is an orphan, treated coldly by the aunt with whom she lives in this house, and teased by her three older boy cousins (an orphan is the recurring figure in children’s literature – every child’s worst fear made manifest, but the status ameliorated by the story); she welcomes Tom (always in his pyjamas) and shows him her secret hiding places: ‘a leafy crevice between a wall and a tree-trunk, where a small human body could just wedge itself; a hollowed-out centre to a box-bush, and a run leading to it – like the run made in the hedge by the meadow; a wigwam shelter made by a rearrangement of the bean-sticks …’ As the story continues, Tom and Hatty stray beyond the confines of the garden to the meadow and the river beyond, but always the garden is central, the place into which Tom escapes each night, the place where Hatty can join him: ‘He saw the garden at many times of its day, and at different seasons; its favourite was summer, with perfect weather. In earliest summer hyacinths were still out in the crescent beds on the lawn, and wallflowers in the round ones. Then the hyacinths bowed and died; and the wallflowers were uprooted, and stocks and asters bloomed in their stead. There was a clipped box bush by the greenhouse, with a cavity like a great mouth cut into the side of it; this was stacked full of pots of geraniums in flower. Along the sundial path, heavy red poppies came out, and roses; and, in summer dusk, the evening primroses glimmered like little moons.’